A Short History of Indonesia
For local rulers, conversion to the new religion offered more than
economic benefits. In particular, the faith gave them direct access to
fellow Muslim rulers in south Asia and the Middle East, and especially
to the Ottoman empire, then a major world power. Such contacts
enhanced their political standing in the eyes of their populations
and—perhaps more importantly—in the eyes of potential rivals. They
also provided a conduit for the supply of military equipment, especially
firearms (including cannon), and military advisors.
The conversion to Islam of the entrepot of Aceh, at the north-
ern tip of Sumatera, in the mid-fourteenth century, and of Melaka,
on the other side of the Straits of Melaka, perhaps half a century later,
marks the point when the spread of Islam through Indonesia became
significant.
From Sumatera, Islam followed the trade routes east. Gresik, an
important port just to the west of Surabaya in east Java, was converted
a decade after Aceh. Then followed Ternate, 2000 kilometres to the
east in the Maluku islands (1460), Demak in central Java (1480),
Banten in west Java (1525), Buton in southwest Sulawesi (1580) and
Makasar in south Sulawesi (1605).
By the early decades of the seventeenth century, Islam had been
introduced to virtually all the major coastal societies of the archipelago,
but from this point it made no further substantial territorial advances.
The beginnings of colonialism
If Muslim dominance of the spice trade route back to Europe had had
the effect of boosting the spread of Islam in the archipelago, it also
contributed, though less directly, to the colonisation of the region by
European powers. Political power in Europe was gradually shifting west-
ward from the Italian peninsular states to the Atlantic coast, and in
particular to Portugal and Spain. The merchants and political leaders
from these rising powers were not content to see their supplies of
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T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
Indonesian spices controlled by the well-established Muslim-dominated
chain of intermediaries passing through the Red Sea and the Levant.
Toward the end of the fourteenth century and early in the fifteenth, in
an effort to bypass the Muslim traders of the Middle East, Portuguese
navigators and merchants sought a sea passage to Asia. They pushed
south down the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope and
across the western side of the Indian Ocean to India itself. In 1511 they
captured Melaka, and finally reached the Maluku islands in 1512, where
they established a base on the island of Ambon. They then turned their
efforts to collecting spices, trying to secure a monopoly on the trade;
they also set about converting the local population to Catholicism.
The Portuguese presence had a significant impact on the disper-
sion of both trade and traders around the archipelago.
By capturing Melaka the Portuguese had ensured that, for the
moment at least, no one power held even a quasi-monopoly of the
primary entrepot at the eastern end of the spice route to Europe. But
they soon found that what they had captured at Melaka was simply a
location, not a trading function. Many of the Asian traders who had
previously used Melaka’s markets and storage facilities now dispersed
to other ports, among them Aceh and Jambi in Sumatera, Banten,
Cirebon, Demak and Surabaya in Java, and Makasar in Sulawesi.
Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatera, became the dominant
power at the western end of the archipelago, and the entrance to the
Straits of Melaka. By the 1570s it had extended its influence south-
ward, absorbing the neighbouring states of Pasai and Pidië. It was at
the height of its power under the rule of Sultan Iskandar Muda
(r. 1607–1638).
By the late sixteenth century, Banten in west Java had emerged
as the most important pepper-trading port in the region, and a major
revictualling and warehousing site for traffic of all kinds passing
through the archipelago.
In the east of the archipelago, by the beginning of the seventeenth
century Makasar was dominant. It had benefited considerably from
33
A Short History of Indonesia
the Portuguese capture of Melaka in 1511, attracting many traders
from Indonesia and other parts of Asia who did not wish to do busi-
ness with the Portuguese: Malays and Javanese in particular. Dutch
and English traders too used Melaka’s trading facilities. Although they
were rivals both commercially and politically, the trade passing
through Makasar was too important to rule it off limits to either
power. Moreover, it was independent of Portugal, their common
enemy. Makasar had become the key to regional trade in which the
most important items were spices from the Maluku islands and slaves,
either from Sulawesi itself or from islands to its immediate north and
south. Other important commodities passing through Makasar
included pepper from Banjarmasin in Kalimantan and Jambi in
Sumatera, cotton and iron from India, gold and silver dollars from
Manila and sugar and gold from China. Makasar itself was a signifi-
cant exporter of rice (at least until well into the seventeenth century)
and cloth.
By 1637, when Matoaya, the greatest of the early rulers of
Makasar, died, the Makasar empire had reached its greatest extent,
stretching from Lombok in the west to the Kei Islands off New Guinea
to the east.
One of the key characteristics of the Muslim port states was their
cosmopolitan nature. By early in the sixteenth century, all of them
had substantial communities of people from the Indian subcontinent,
Persia and the Middle East, and important roles were played in virtu-
ally all of them by Muslims from other parts of Asia.
Given their later and highly equivocal position in Indonesian
society, it is useful to note in particular that by the sixteenth century
there were also substantial numbers of people of Chinese descent, or
mixed Chinese-Javanese descent, residing in the ports of Java (and in
many other islands of the archipelago). Among them was a significant
number of Muslims. Of the nine ‘saints’—the wali songo—said by
Javanese legend to have brought Islam to the island, Raden Patah was
not the only one apparently of at least partial Chinese descent.1
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T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
Indeed, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while China
forbade its citizens to travel abroad, those who by whatever means did
manage to get to Southeast Asia had little option other than to remain,
and to do so meant assimilating into the local communities. Apart from
anything else, there was little possibility of renewing either their cultural
roots or their numbers through the arrival of new people and ideas from
China. It was only after direct contacts between China and Indonesia
were renewed after 1567 that the region saw an increase in the numbers
of ethnic Chinese who maintained their connections with China.
Majapahit, the dominant inland Javanese state, remained under
Hindu influence for much longer than the ports, although the evidence
of gravestones suggests that from the middle of the fourteenth century
onward, at least some state officials were Muslims though the rulers
were not. Majapahit was unusual, though not unique, among the
Javanese states in that it had both agricultural and maritime bases. And
it was at least in part this combination which gave it its strength. Its
ports gave it considerable income from regional and international trade,
far beyond what it could have earned simply from its own produce. Its
agricultural production gave it a measure of economic security which
states relying solely on trade did not have, its surpluses of rice in partic-
ular giving it the resources it needed to finance its trade with Maluku,
China, India and Europe. Control over trade seems to have been the
more important element in the maintenance of its power, however.
By the early years of the sixteenth century, Majapahit—its capital
now near Kediri in east Java—was crumbling. The trade that had been
so important in its emergence as a regional power was ultimately the
cause of its downfall. Majapahit’s powerful trading role had depended
on its capacity to monopolise the trade routes running through the
archipelago. So long as it had this power, it held the whip hand over
potential rivals and rebels. The great expansion in demand for the archi-
pelago’s products had meant greater incentives for rivals to seek access
to the region’s exports, and the alliance of trade with Islam gave those
rivals an additional impetus to break away from Majapahit’s control.
35
A Short History of Indonesia
By this time the most powerful of these rivals was the port city
of Demak, located on Java’s north coast (the pasisir). Under its ex-
pansionist and proselytising ruler Sultan Trenggana (r. 1504–1546),
Demak pushed south and east into the heartland of Majapahit. In 1527
Majapahit succumbed, and thus the last of the Hindu–Buddhist states
of Java disappeared, a thousand years after they had first emerged.
Although Majapahit was defeated militarily and politically, its
moral and cultural influence persisted. The state of Demak, for
instance, claimed to be the legitimate, hereditary successor to Maja-
pahit on the grounds that Raden Patah, founder of Demak’s ruling
Islamic dynasty, was the son of the last king of Majapahit and a
Chinese princess. The story is probably apocryphal, but it illustrates
not just the mixed ethnicity of the port elites but also the significance
they attached to demonstrating links to Majapahit. Although at one
level the religious enemy of the Islamic ports, at another Majapahit
was still the Javanese heartland, its values the ultimate legitimator of
leadership.
Demak, however, was not long left to enjoy its success. In 1546
Sultan Trenggana was murdered; there followed a war over the succes-
sion to the sultanate, which destroyed Demak as a state and brought to
a halt its pretensions to island-wide sovereignty. In its wake, the pattern
of inter-state conflict intensified, a two-fold division of power on the
island ensuing. One power focus lay to the east, among the ports of the
pasisir, and was centred on Surabaya; the other lay inland, centred first
on Pajang and then on Mataram, an emerging Islamic south-central
Javanese state with its capital near the present-day city of Yogyakarta.
By the seventeenth century, Mataram had become the most powerful of
the Javanese states, bringing the coastal states under its control. The
appeal of Islam for Mataram—and for other inland societies—lay not in
the democratic, egalitarian qualities which had led to its ready accept-
ance in the cosmopolitan port states, but more in its mystical qualities.
As we have already noted, inland Javanese societies were organ-
ised on a strictly hierarchical basis, to which the egalitarian traditions
36
T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
of Islam were not particularly attractive. Mataram for most of the
seventeenth century, under rulers such as Agung and Amangkurat I,
was a centralised and absolutist state: there was nothing egalitarian
or democratic about the way these rulers went about their tasks.
Another important factor promoting Islam here was that its most
active missionaries were Sufis, members of a mystical Islamic sect. The
ideas they promoted, including the veneration of saints and pilgrim-
ages to sacred places, fitted in quite easily with many pre-existing
religious beliefs and practices in Java.
The rulers of Mataram were the central element in both the
political and the religious structures of the state. And here we can see
that, although now Muslim in form and symbolism, in many respects
Mataram continued to follow the practices of its Hindu and Buddhist
predecessors. Indeed, like the earlier rulers of Demak the rulers of
Mataram did much to stress that they were the legitimate successors to
the rulers of Majapahit, even though there had been a considerable
hiatus between the fall of Majapahit and the rise of Mataram.
In earlier Javanese states, the ruler was seen as the reincarnation
of a god; since the inhabitants of Mataram were now formally Muslim,
this interpretation was no longer open to their rulers, but they were
certainly regarded as having a special relationship to Allah. And they
retained the pre-Islamic idea that they were responsible for ensuring
that the state was in a condition of equilibrium, of harmony and tran-
quillity. Any absence of equilibrium—as shown by deliberate actions,
such as rebellions against the ruler by disaffected nobles, or through
natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or floods
—was evidence that the king was failing in his job, and thus possibly
liable to be removed.
There was theoretically no limit to the power of the ruler. In
practice, though, a major limitation was presented by the sheer size of
the state, and the resultant difficulty of ensuring that the ruler was
aware of what was happening in all parts of the realm, and that his
wishes would be obeyed throughout the kingdom. In fact, the direct
37
A Short History of Indonesia
power of the ruler was strong only at the centre of the state, in
its capital. The further from the centre, the weaker the power of
the ruler.
Outside its core heartland, administration of the state was in the
hands of the priyayi, a largely hereditary aristocracy. Formally at least,
the priyayi had a very strongly developed set of values and norms,
which stressed status and etiquette, refinement and self-control. Ordi-
nary people were everything the priyayi were not: coarse, emotional,
unrefined.
From the priyayi was drawn the group of men who represented
the ruler in the districts and regions outside the capital: the most
common term for such officials was bupati, a term still in use today for
the Indonesian official who heads a shire or a county.
The bupati, while officially the representatives of the ruler, in
fact usually exercised very considerable local autonomy. A significant
link between the ruler and his various bupati was taxation. It was also
through the taxation system that those local officials earned their
incomes. Officials were not paid a salary; rather, they had the right to
keep the difference between the taxes they could extract from their
regions, and the net tax they paid to the ruler. This would clearly have
put the bupati in a very powerful position to squeeze the local popula-
tion in some cases, but not always. Until two or three centuries ago,
Java as a whole was underpopulated: people who felt they were being
treated too harshly by their local bupati were usually able to retaliate
simply by moving on to an uninhabited, and thus untaxed, region.
Since with no people the bupati would earn no income—and with no
taxes being paid to the ruler would soon be without a job and perhaps
without a life as well—there was a strong incentive for bupati to treat
their local populations, if not generously, at least with a degree of self-
interested compassion.
The wealth brought by the trade boom also contributed to the
development of major urban centres in the archipelago. The first
Europeans to travel in Indonesia during the age of commerce reported
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T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
finding cities that were substantial by European standards. It seems
likely that cities such as Aceh, Banten, Demak, Surabaya and Makasar
all had populations exceeding 50 000 in the sixteenth or seventeenth
century, on a par with many European cities of the day.
Indonesian ships, especially those of the Javanese, were by the
global standards of the day also substantial: the Portuguese, when they
first arrived early in the sixteenth century, routinely remarked on the
size of the vessels they encountered. Ships of 500 or more tonnes,
sometimes built in the Pegu region of Burma but more often in the
north coast ports of Java, including Jepara and Rembang, were parti-
cularly useful in the rice trade, characterised as it was by the need to
transport large quantities of a commodity whose value was small rela-
tive to its volume. Small vessels would almost certainly not have
proven economical. Other large ships were used as troop-carriers in
major military expeditions. The word ‘junk’ originally came into the
English language, and similar words into other European languages,
from the Malay word jong for this kind of vessel.
For much of the period covered by this chapter, local rulers
regarded the European presence in the archipelago as of little conse-
quence and saw no necessity to abandon longstanding political and
other feuds with their neighbours in order to band together to expel
them. This was to be a fatal error—albeit one which is most obvious
in hindsight.
As we have noted, the Portuguese were the first Europeans into
the archipelago. But following not far behind them were the English, the
Spanish and, most importantly for us here, the Dutch. Their motives
were much the same as the Portuguese, though of course we must add in
the emerging rivalries between these powers. Each wanted to secure a
monopoly of the Indies trade; each wanted to exclude the others.
The first Dutch voyages to the Indies took place in the 1590s. The
first fleet, of four ships and 249 men, set out in April 1595. Two years
later three of those ships, with a total of 89 surviving crew, made it back
to Amsterdam, proving that it was possible for Dutch ships to reach the
39
A Short History of Indonesia
Indies, successfully evading the Portuguese. As a result, a flurry of ships
headed towards the spice islands; 22 of them in 1598, for instance.
Initially these voyages were extremely profitable: one expedition,
sent by a company based in Amsterdam, returned a profit of 300 per
cent. However, the number of ships reaching the islands, and the
volume of spices they bought for sale back in Europe, soon had
the effect of increasing the prices demanded by the spice producers and
lowering the prices that could be commanded in Europe. As a result,
the central and provincial governments in the Netherlands urged the
major Dutch trading companies to combine their efforts, and to form
a single company in which they would all be shareholders. In this way,
‘wasteful’ competition could be eliminated. Thus on 20 March 1602,
the United East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Com-
pagnie or VOC) was established.
The VOC was a joint stock company, in which six regional
chambers of commerce, Amsterdam being the most prominent, held
the shares. It was governed by a board of seventeen directors. In some
respects it was similar to other trading companies being established at
the same time, such as the English East India Company, but in other
respects it was innovative. Most importantly, shareholders invested
their money in the Company, not in individual voyages. This gave the
Company’s directors the opportunity to pursue long-term rather than
short-term objectives, to take strategic decisions rather than having to
return a profit on each and every voyage.
The first major VOC base in the archipelago was at Ambon,
which it seized from the Portuguese in 1605. Quite quickly the
Company’s officers realised that this was a far from ideal site for their
regional headquarters, most importantly because they needed to
participate in the intra-Asian trade networks, linking the Indies with
China, Japan and India, as well as in the inter-continental trade to
Europe. There were two major reasons for this.
One was that the intra-Asian routes were profitable in their own
right. This was, after all, the reason why generations of Javanese,
40
T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
Malay, Chinese, Gujerati and other traders had been engaged in
them. The other reason was that exploitation of these networks was
necessary in order for the Dutch to participate profitably in the inter-
continental spice trade that had drawn them here in the first place.
For the Company, the basic problem with the spice trade was finding
a way of paying for the goods it purchased. The Netherlands itself
produced almost nothing that the spice producers wanted. The Srivi-
jayans, the Melakans, the people of Majapahit and other local traders,
when buying spices in Maluku, offered primarily food—particularly
rice—and cloth in exchange, goods which were in high demand in
the spice islands. The Dutch had to adapt their trading practices to
this fact; in other words, they had to acquire food and cloth with
which to buy spices. And this food and cloth could come from Java,
China, Japan, India, or places in between.
The intra-Asian trade routes passed through the western, not the
eastern, part of the archipelago. Thus began the search for a site in
the west which could serve as both the major warehousing and trans-
shipping site for goods being traded within the Asian region and as
the regional administrative headquarters of the Company.
The site initially chosen was the port of Banten, on the north-
east coast of Java. Already a thriving harbour principality at the turn
of the seventeenth century, Banten drew its commercial strength from
the trade with China: it was a crucial hub in the Chinese trading
networks in the region, whose importance had been boosted consid-
erably by the movement there of many of the Chinese who had been
excluded from Melaka by the Portuguese. It had replaced Melaka as
the most important pepper port supplying the Chinese market by the
end of the sixteenth century. It was here the Dutch traders had made
their initial Indonesian landfall. But other foreign traders were here
as well: notably the strongest European competitors of the Dutch, the
English. The ruler of Banten himself was not particularly keen on
having the Dutch set up a large-scale and potentially permanent
enterprise here, being concerned—with considerable justification—
41
A Short History of Indonesia
at the impact that the Anglo-Dutch rivalry would have on his state.
The Dutch thus decided to look for a new site, in roughly the
same region, but one over which they would be able to exercise greater
control. They eventually settled on a fine natural harbour at the mouth
of the Ciliwung River, near a relatively small port principality called
Jayakarta. In 1610 they concluded a contract with the Jayakarta prince
permitting them to build warehouses and establish their headquarters
here. They named their settlement Batavia. Subsequently renamed
Jakarta—a variant of Jayakarta—it is today the capital of Indonesia.
The decision to establish this base at Batavia was an important
and necessary commercial step: it allowed the Company to build the
warehouses, victualling and ship-repair facilities and so forth which
were necessary for its trading operations. But the very success of this
endeavour gradually changed the kind of role that the Company was
to play in the archipelago, in at least two important ways.
First, the establishment of a major base meant that the Company
had to devote some of its resources to managing the people and mate-
rials being gathered there: in other words, it had to become something
of a territorial administrator. To be sure, at first the territory to be
administered was not extensive; but the initial aim of the Company’s
founders had been to avoid becoming territorially involved in the
archipelago at all, precisely to avoid the costs which such a move
would inevitably bring with them.
Second, the establishment of this base inevitably brought the
VOC into conflict not only with the English, already established at
Banten, but also with neighbouring Javanese states, which not surpris-
ingly resented this intrusion into their realms. Banten itself claimed
that Jayakarta was part of its territory, and thus that Batavia was on its
soil. More importantly, the VOC also fell foul of Mataram. Just as
Batavia was being established, Mataram under Sultan Agung was
reaching the peak of its military power and geographical extent.
Banten and the English each made several attempts to seize control
of Batavia in the first decade of its existence, some of which went close
42
T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
to success. But ultimately neither was militarily strong enough—or,
for that matter, politically strong enough—to dislodge the Company’s
forces. Mataram, though, should have been a different matter.
For some time after its establishment, Mataram paid little atten-
tion to Batavia. The settlement was regarded as a relatively minor
irritation compared with the much more important issue of bringing
the trading states of the north coast pasisir under Mataram’s control.
The VOC itself sought to establish friendly relations with Mataram,
sending ambassadors to its court, bringing with them tribute in the
traditional manner.
By the 1620s this situation had changed significantly. Mataram
captured the major east Javanese ports of Gresik, Tuban, Pasuruan and
Surabaya between 1621 and 1625, effectively giving it control over
east and central Java. For the first time since the fall of Majapahit, an
inland state controlled the trade passing through Java’s north coast
ports. Sultan Agung now turned his attention to Batavia, which stood
between him and effective control of all of Java.
In 1628 and 1629, Mataram laid siege to Batavia, the first time
nearly succeeding in capturing the position. The second expedition,
though, proved less fortunate, and revealed the state’s strategic weak-
ness. Mataram had great land-based strength, being able to bring up an
army of perhaps 160 000 men to besiege the VOC position. But to
provide all those men with food, supplies had to be brought in along
the north coast, by sea: there was simply no way that the quantities of
food required could have been taken to Batavia by bullock cart, the
most efficient means of land transport then available. Unfortunately,
the Mataram navy—a not inconsiderable force by Indonesian stan-
dards—was substantially less skilled and less well equipped than the
navy of the VOC. The Company was thus able to interdict Mataram
shipping, and thereby to cut off, or at least greatly reduce, the supply
of food to the army outside Batavia’s walls. In the end, Sultan Agung
had to acknowledge his incapacity to take the town, and pulled back
from it.
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A Short History of Indonesia
This reverse certainly did not mean that Mataram was no longer
a major power: the VOC post was still a nuisance rather than a major
challenger for power, albeit a nuisance Mataram could well do without.
But it did mean that the VOC had established itself as an important
local power, able to justify its presence in Java by military strength. For
the next century and a half, the VOC and Mataram engaged in a strug-
gle to control Java, a struggle that would eventually exhaust both sides.
At the same time that Mataram was being forced back from
Batavia, Aceh, the strongest Indonesian state in the western part of
the archipelago, also suffered defeat at the hands of the colonialists,
this time the Portuguese. The Portuguese capture of Melaka, as we
have seen, resulted in most Asian shipping shifting to other harbours,
including the important Islamic pepper port of Aceh—which had
never accepted the presence of the Portuguese in Melaka, from either
a religious or a commercial viewpoint.
In the 1620s, the greatest of the Acehnese rulers, Sultan Iskan-
dar Muda (r. 1607–1636) invested enormous quantities of material and
human resources in an attempt to crush the Portuguese presence in
Melaka. Having been rebuffed in a direct attack, he shifted tactics,
gradually encircling Melaka by conquering its surrounding Malay
states. He finally laid siege to the city in 1629—but was defeated. His
navy was ultimately no match for that of the Portuguese, nor could he
rely on the support of his Malay subjects in the struggle.
But Portuguese influence in the region more generally was on the
wane and that of the Dutch rising. In Maluku, the Dutch eliminated
the Portuguese and the Spanish from Ternate by 1606 and Tidore 60 years
later. Local rulers were forced into concluding agreements with the
Dutch, recognising the latter’s sole right to participate in the spice trade.
In 1620–23, in their efforts to ensure control of the nutmeg
production from Banda, the Dutch all but wiped out the indigenous
population of the island, replacing the local people with Eurasians
and others believed to be more loyal to the Company and more accom-
modating to its demands. Cloves came under its control in the 1650s,
44
T h e a g e o f c o m m e r c e 1 4 0 0 –1 7 0 0
when it captured the island of Ambon. Being in a monopoly position,
the VOC was also able to reduce substantially the participation in the
spice trade of Javanese, Buginese, Malay and other traders operating
out of ports on both sides of the Java Sea and the Straits of Melaka.
But the Dutch were still confronted by the power of Makasar, the
key spice trading entrepot in eastern Indonesia. In the first half of
the seventeenth century, the rulers of Makasar were committed to
keeping their port open to traders from all around the region, and from
around the world. In particular they saw free trade in spices, the most
important of the commodities produced in the region, to be in their
best interests. One ruler of Makasar is famously quoted as having
written: ‘God made the land and the sea; the land he divided among
men and the sea he gave in common. It has never been heard that
anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas’.
Free trade was not on the Company’s agenda, however; its aim
was to monopolise the spice trade and thus maximise its own profits.
Other traders, including Muslims from Maluku and from other
parts of Indonesia, together with Europeans such as the English and the
Portuguese, not surprisingly refused to recognise this self-proclaimed
Dutch monopoly, and actively sought to break the Dutch hold on the
trade. What was free trade to them became smuggling to the Dutch,
in which Makasar came to play a central role. As we have seen, it
quickly developed into the major centre of resistance to the Dutch
attempt at monopoly, with Malay, Javanese, Gujerati, English and
Portuguese merchants all using its facilities. Makasar also maintained a
strong military presence in the east, in the spice islands, to protect its
commercial interests there. The VOC’s pretensions to power in the
eastern archipelago could not succeed so long as Makasar remained
unchallenged.
The Dutch launched a series of naval expeditions against
Makasar in the first half of the seventeenth century, but none was
successful. In 1656, though, they managed to seal off the clove pro-
duction in Maluku, having finally managed to defeat the local Muslim
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A Short History of Indonesia
traders, making it very difficult for the merchants in Makasar to get
access to the spices. The VOC, however, wanted to finish Makasar off,
once and for all. Following a pattern already established in other con-
flicts in the region, they sought allies among Makasar’s regional
enemies. There are two great ethnic communities residing in the
Makasar region: the Makasarese and the Buginese. The conflicts
between these two groups were legendary, and in some senses continue
to the present day. The Dutch found allies in their struggle against the
Makasarese among the Buginese, and especially in one of the greatest
Buginese leaders, Arung Palakka.
In 1660 the Dutch struck a deal with Arung Palakka in which the
latter agreed to provide troops to support the Dutch in their attacks on
Makasar, in return for which he expected to be able to free the Bugi-
nese from Makasarese overlordship. The Makasarese tried to negotiate
an alliance with Mataram in Java, and thus force the Dutch to fight on
two fronts, but the Mataram ruler dismissed the proposition. In 1667 a
combined force of Dutch and Buginese troops, together with
Ambonese soldiers in Dutch employ, attacked Makasar and forced it to
the negotiating table. Two years later, again supported by Arung
Palakka, the Dutch attacked and destroyed the last major fort held by
the Makasarese.
As a result of these combined military actions, the Indonesian
and foreign traders were driven out of Makasar, and the city’s inde-
pendence destroyed. Many non-Dutch traders, both local and foreign,
transferred their activities westward to Banjarmasin in southeast Kali-
mantan, which tried to replace Makasar as the regional centre of trade,
but with little success. Many Makasarese traders and soldiers moved to
Java (where ultimately they came to be regarded by the Dutch as
posing a threat to their control of trade through the pasisir ports). No
longer would Makasar pose a threat to Dutch ambitions in the eastern
part of the archipelago. The port continued to play an important role
in regional trade, but as part of the larger Dutch trading machine,
not in its own right.
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The Buginese soon found that they had effectively swapped their
Makasarese masters for the Dutch, and many left the region to settle in
other ports, re-establishing their trading networks. By the eighteenth
century they had secured control of the Riau region and thus the
entrance to the Straits of Melaka.
By the mid-seventeenth century, such was their degree of control
over the Maluku spice trade, the Dutch were able to sell spices in
Europe at about seventeen times the price for which they had bought
them in Maluku, with none of the profit passing into Asian hands.
Thus not only did the spice producers suffer; so did the trading inter-
mediaries—Javanese, Malay and others—who had been the mainstays
of the spice trade, the rice merchants who had supplied rice to those
intermediaries and the multitude of others who had become depend-
ent on participation in or support for the spice trade for their living.
The VOC had clearly begun to make the transition from being
simply a trader to being a regional power.
Controlling the supply of pepper to the European market was more
difficult to achieve than controlling the supply of spices, but even here
the Dutch had a considerable measure of success. Sumatera was the key
region, with significant amounts of pepper being produced in Aceh in
the north, the Minangkabau highlands in the mid-west and the
Lampung region in the south. In the north, Aceh was by now consider-
ably smaller than it had been in its heyday, but it was still a regionally
significant port for the export of pepper, as well as tin, camphor, gold and
silk. Politically—and economically—it had not recovered from its
defeat by the Portuguese in 1629, and the exercise of Dutch naval
strength was sufficient to persuade it to surrender its pepper (and tin)
producing regions to the Company. Under the terms of the Painan
Contract, negotiated in 1663, the Dutch secured a complete monopoly
on various products passing through Acehnese ports, including pepper.
Further south, the Dutch had established a strong presence in
Padang, the only important port on the western side of Sumatera
facing the Indian Ocean, and one of the two major export outlets for
47
A Short History of Indonesia
the products of the Minangkabau highlands, chiefly rice, pepper and
gold. The Dutch established a warehouse here as early as 1666, though
their influence remained confined to a tightly circumscribed area
around the port itself, and did not penetrate inland to any significant
extent. (They were strong in the port itself but, like the Portuguese in
Melaka, could not extend that influence further afield.)
The other major outlet for Minangkabau products was eastward,
down the long and meandering rivers that flowed eventually into
the Straits of Melaka. This region was still nominally independent,
but in fact was commercially under the influence of Melaka, by this
time a Dutch territory. Thus the Dutch managed to lock up the ex-
ports from the Minangkabau region quite effectively, although the
Minangkabau heartland remained untouched by Dutch influence,
the Minangkabau state remaining politically and administratively
independent of foreign control.
The Dutch were not the only colonial power with a physical pres-
ence in Sumatera. In the south of the island, at Bengkulu, the English
East India Company had a base called Fort Marlborough whose origins
dated back to the early seventeenth century and the intrusion of the
Dutch into west Java. We have already noted that when the Dutch
arrived at Banten they found the British there ahead of them and
moved further to the east to establish their base at what became
Batavia. Over time Dutch influence spread back into Banten, and in
1682 the Dutch were able to get the ruler of Banten to give them a
monopoly of trade through the port, and to expel the British. This was
a major blow to the British, since it meant that the only way they
could now get access to the valuable pepper exports of west Java and
southern Sumatera was by going through the Dutch. An alternative
base had to be found. After some searching around, in mid-1685 an
agreement was reached with a local ruler in south Sumatera for the
establishment of a British base at Bengkulu, under the administration
of the Presidency of Madras in India.
48
4
ECONOMIC DEMISE,
POLITICAL DECLINE:
1600–1800
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the power of many of the
Indonesian states, built up through the profits earned in trade and
given spiritual strength by Islam, was beginning to wane. Political
and economic strength was being dissipated in intra-state struggles,
especially in the inland centres which, on the face of it, ought to have
been able to supplant the much smaller coastal ones, but which by
and large failed to do so. By the end of the eighteenth century, the
stage was set for the rise of the age of European imperialism.
49
A Short History of Indonesia
The age of commerce ended for Indonesia as it began: with changes in
demand for the products that Indonesia supplied to international
markets. The second and third quarters of the seventeenth century saw
economic crisis replace boom in most of the economically advanced
world, including Europe and China. Prices were falling, population
numbers stagnating or even declining, and political crises challenging
established rulers and state systems.
Indonesian traders were also hit by regulations issued by the
Japanese government in 1639, closing that country off to all interna-
tional trade except with China and the Netherlands. Up until this
time, direct trade between China and Japan had been banned, in
theory if not in fact, as one of the ways the ban was overcome was
through the exchange of goods in overseas ports. One of the most
important of these ports was Banten in west Java, whose role in the
Chinese trade networks across the region has already been noted.
When the Japanese government decided to close the country off from
the rest of the world, this trade network collapsed virtually overnight.
The external world had changed in other ways too. In 1567 the
Ming Dynasty in China had repealed the regulation prohibiting its
citizens from engaging in private overseas trade, thus freeing Chinese
traders to once again sail direct to Indonesia to collect the goods they
wished to import. This they had begun to do, and in large numbers,
squeezing out many of the Indonesian intermediaries who had been
carrying goods north to China.
The reactions of the Indonesians and the Dutch to all these
external forces were rather different, reflecting in large measure the
different kinds of options they faced.
The general Dutch response was to try to preserve as much of
their volume of trade as possible, which meant driving down the pur-
chase prices they paid for Indonesian commodities as far as they would
go, and eliminating their competitors. In this respect, the crisis really
did little more than confirm the Dutch in the policies they had been
pursuing to that moment.
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The effects on Indonesian producers were more substantial. In
many areas they retreated from the marketplace, which was increas-
ingly left to the Europeans and ethnic Chinese—although, as will be
seen, at least some of the European traders were no better placed to
cope with the economic downturn than their Indonesian competitors
had been. Right across the archipelago, we see peoples who had
formerly been producers of cash crops—notably spices and pepper—
destroying those crops, and planting instead subsistence crops,
especially rice.
Not all Indonesian producers reacted in this way to the pressure
of the market. Some of the pepper producers of Sumatera, for instance,
who had also developed a strong market for cotton cloth from India
while demand for their pepper was strong, responded to the decline in
the demand for pepper by switching to the production of substitutes for
formerly imported goods. As the economic decline began, not only had
their incomes from pepper production declined; due to political up-
heavals in India the quality of the cloth they imported had fallen as its
price had risen. This presented the pepper producers with a dilemma:
they had become accustomed to consuming cloth to the point where
giving it up was extremely difficult, but they no longer had the income
to purchase it as before.
What they did was to stop planting pepper—after all, the market
no longer wanted their crop—and plant cotton instead. Not only did
this cotton enable the producers to meet the Sumateran demand for
cloth; they were also able to supply cotton to weaving centres in other
parts of the region, filling the void left by the disappearance of Indian
cloth. Among the emerging cloth centres was Java, whose batik indus-
try was also given a boost by the availability of local, and affordable,
cloth. So the picture was not one of totally unmitigated gloom.
For the more powerful, absolutist rulers such as Sultan Agung of
Mataram, these developments were particularly worrying, for they had
come to rely on the income generated from trade as an essential back-
up to their political power. Finding themselves bereft of that backing,
51
A Short History of Indonesia
they, or their immediate successors, generally reacted by seeking to
safeguard what political power they had at the expense of commerce.
Thus Agung launched a series of attacks on the once-again rebellious
ports of the Javanese pasisir, which found themselves caught between
Dutch commercial pressure to the north, and Mataram’s military
pressure from the south.
Many Indonesian cities, once major cosmopolitan centres of con-
siderable size attracting peoples from right around the region, faded
back toward their provincial origins. In the case of those overrun by
the Dutch, large numbers of their inhabitants, both locals and for-
eigners, fled. While often a search for personal safety and survival, this
was also a search for new commercial opportunities: the traders among
these people knew that the Dutch would not permit them the freedom
they needed to carry on their businesses as before. This was the fate
that befell Makasar when it came under Dutch control in 1669,
Banten in 1682, and other trading centres such as Palembang, Banjar-
masin, Ternate and Kupang at much the same time.
The retreat from the cash economy had a variety of knock-on
effects. Given that they had less income, Indonesians also had less to
spend on the commodities they had previously bought freely. For
example, imports of Indian cloth by private traders in Batavia, for sale
in the north Java ports, fell dramatically in the late seventeenth
century, from a peak of 60 000 pieces in 1685 to only about 5000 pieces
in 1705. Over the same period, the value of cloth exports from Batavia
to the north coast ports fell by more than 90 per cent. Although the
significance of this decline might be clouded somewhat by the fact that
Indian cloth was used chiefly not for clothing but as a store of wealth,
a form of money, the message that there was a major decline in the
welfare of the inhabitants of the ports seems inescapable.
Indonesian traders were hit hard, as evidenced by the substantial
decline in the size and number of Indonesian ships engaged in archi-
pelagic and regional trade at the end of the seventeenth century,
compared with the figures for a century or so earlier. The situation was
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made worse by the fact that in 1651 Sultan Agung prohibited his sub-
jects from travelling abroad and in 1655 closed all Javanese ports and
ordered the seizure or destruction of all Javanese vessels. What com-
merce remained no longer needed the large cargo ships for which the
Indonesians had been known at the start of the age of commerce.
Being relegated in effect to the much smaller coastal routes, traders
switched to smaller, shallower-draught vessels. The days of Indonesian
dominance of seaborne trade were over.
The questions remain, however: Why were Indonesian states and
their producers and traders, by and large, unsuccessful in meeting the
challenge of changed trading circumstances? Why did the region’s
participation in global trade in the sixteenth century not lead to the
development of local forms of capitalism, which might in turn have led
to the emergence of local states comparable with those that emerged
in Europe and Japan at much the same time, and would have enabled
Indonesia to weather the trade bust?
Early European observers argued that the fundamental commer-
cial weakness of the local states lay in the fact that their rulers had
no respect for private property, and were inclined to confiscate it arbi-
trarily. Thus no private citizens could feel secure in their wealth, nor
could they rely on being able to pass on accumulated wealth to their
descendants. Under such circumstances, investment in infrastructure
which would preserve or create wealth such as ships and strong, defen-
sible warehouses for the storage of trade goods was unattractive.
Rather, wealth was going to be held in forms that could be easily
hidden and readily transported in case of danger. Under such circum-
stances, wealth clearly was not being put to commercially productive
work. Thus, once the supply of profits dried up, the local economies
collapsed.
Other historians have pointed to the fact that, unlike the case in
the countries of western Europe, state rule and commercial activities
were tightly linked in the Indonesian states; their rulers either held
trade as their own monopoly, or else permitted only those merchants
53
A Short History of Indonesia
with whom they were in alliance to trade, thus preventing the emer-
gence of a class of capitalist entrepreneurs independent of the state.
When trade declined, the power of the state was threatened, and under
such circumstances most state rulers reacted in defensive ways, seeking
to shore up their political power by other means. They were not
commercial risk-takers; they were conservative politicians.
The other explanation often given relates to the arrival in the
region of the Europeans; that the Europeans were sufficiently power-
ful—militarily and commercially—to defeat the local states and
traders. It is clear that from about the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s the
major Indonesian trading states fell to hostile forces, most of which
were either European in origin, or in which Europeans played impor-
tant roles even though the Europeans were by no means demonstrably
superior in matters of either commerce or technology.
In the case of spice production in the Maluku islands, the VOC
was certainly the crucial factor in destroying local producers and
traders after it established its monopoly from the middle of the seven-
teenth century. It used this monopoly power ruthlessly.
In all probability, none of these factors on its own was decisive.
But taken together, their force was virtually unstoppable, especially in
those states that had come to depend on trade for their incomes—and
this meant virtually all the major Indonesian states at this time. From
this point on, the states tended to turn inwards, to be concerned
chiefly with intra-regional affairs. What had been a region with
vibrant, exciting links with the outside world—links which might
have been based on trade, but which also brought great ideas both
spiritual and secular—became, if not isolationist, then certainly far
less open to the world than it had been.
This development had an important impact on local societies.
Up to this point, there was certainly no sense in which we could talk
of an Indonesian society or nation extending right across the archipel-
ago. There was, nonetheless, a web of trading contacts linking coastal
peoples together. Virtually all the ports of the region had substantial
54
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non-local communities of traders and sailors: Javanese, Malays, Bugi-
nese, Acehnese, Bantenese, and also locally based (and often locally
born) Chinese. By gradually monopolising inter-island and inter-
national trade, the Dutch were weakening, albeit not completely
breaking, these ties and eventually the social links they represented
as well. Further, the Dutch were cutting off the Indonesians from
routine contacts with the wider world beyond the archipelago, and
thus denying them the stimulus that such contacts had previously
provided. Indonesia was becoming isolated not just from the inter-
national marketplace for goods, but also from the international
marketplace for ideas.
The only winners in this situation seemed to be the VOC and the
Chinese traders.
Extension of VOC control
Over the rest of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, the
VOC gradually extended the regions under its control. The establish-
ment of Batavia had marked the beginnings of a change in the status
of the Company, from an entity solely concerned with trade to a
regional administrator. Following Mataram’s failed attempts to seize
Batavia, the Company began pushing out into the Javanese hinterland
and along the north coast. By the end of the seventeenth century it
was the dominant power in the Priangan highlands of west Java, and
eastward from Batavia along the north coast through to the eastern
end of the island. Mataram in central Java for the moment remained
independent, but was becoming increasingly concerned at Dutch
encroachments into its territory.
In the area immediately surrounding Batavia, land was brought
under direct Company rule, often by military conquest. It was then
sold off to private citizens, some from the Netherlands, some from
other parts of Europe and others from China: the Chinese population
55
A Short History of Indonesia
of Batavia in particular grew rapidly after the establishment of the
VOC settlement. Out of a population of just over 27 000 in 1673,
nearly 3000 were Chinese, while there were just over 2000 Europeans
and 700 Eurasians. Indeed, the Chinese had played a crucial role in the
development of Batavia since its very foundation, so much so that
Batavia was in many respects as much a Chinese colonial town as a
western one. The inflow of Chinese picked up even further pace after
the Company’s annexation of Banten in 1683, which brought with it
control of much more land. The Company set about producing sugar
from these lands for the Middle East market but, lacking a local labour
force to work the land, used Chinese immigrants instead.
The Chinese, for the most part, remained in communities dis-
tinct from those of the indigenous population, contrary to the
cosmopolitan experience of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
when ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (and other parts of Southeast Asia)
were forbidden to return to China and thus cut off from cultural or
genetic renewal. Now both these things were possible. As a result, we
see both a resurgence of Chinese ethnic identity and an increased
Chinese dominance of regional trade with China itself and, almost as
a by-product, of domestic trade as well.
Nevertheless, we should be wary of lumping the ethnic Chinese
into the one basket as if they constituted a single community with a
single role to play in Indonesian society. To say that most merchants
were ethnic Chinese is not to say that all ethnic Chinese were mer-
chants. At the margins at least, the boundaries between the ethnic
Chinese and indigenous societies remained in many respects as blurred
as they had always been. At one end of the social and economic scale,
Chinese craftspeople and labourers blended in with local societies; at
the other end, some ethnic Chinese had been almost completely
absorbed into the Javanese aristocracy. In the middle of the eighteenth
century, for instance, the local rulers of Pekalongan, Batang, Sidayu
and Semarang were all of ethnic Chinese descent.
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Decline of Mataram
During the second half of the seventeenth century, the power of the king-
dom of Mataram was clearly on the decline from the time of the death
of Sultan Agung in 1646 and the succession to the throne of his son
Amangkurat I. The ports of the pasisir were once again in conflict with
the authority of the Sultan.
The VOC became increasingly concerned about this situation,
since its major interest in Java was in ensuring access to the island’s
resources. Its policy was to work through the established ruler of
Mataram, who did the actual collecting of revenues through his subor-
dinates, revenues which were then split with the Company. In return,
the Company gave the ruler political and military support. Not only
was this an efficient system of administration from the point of view of
the Company, the Company also believed that it reflected the way that
things had always been done in Java.
In Batavia’s view, Javanese kingdoms were centralised and abso-
lutist, and its approach to Javanese politics was based on the need to
maintain this principle. But the Dutch were misreading the situation: the
Javanese state was not always as centralised and absolutist as they imag-
ined. The ruler of Mataram might, in a formal sense, have been sovereign
along the north coast, but in practice his authority depended on his rela-
tionship with the bupatis of those regions. In some cases the Sultan was
sufficiently strong to be able to appoint his own men to positions of
bupati—though there was no guarantee that the local populations would
willingly follow the instructions of those so appointed. In other cases the
Sultan had to negotiate with local leaders, sometimes bribing them
for their support, sometimes cajoling them, sometimes holding members
of their families hostage as a guarantee of their loyalty, sometimes arrang-
ing marriages between them and his female relatives.
Even when the Sultan could be confident that the pasisir rulers
were loyal, and able to impose their wills on their populations, these
relationships were still of a personal rather than an institutional kind.
57
A Short History of Indonesia
The result was that the Mataram state was held together not so much
by the absolute power of the ruler as by the network of ties with
regional overlords that the ruler was able to enforce.
Despite its misunderstanding of both the complexity of these
relationships and the nature of the authority of Mataram, the VOC’s
policy committed the Company to supporting the ruler of Mataram in
conflicts with his nominal vassals, including the rulers of the north
coast states.
Perhaps the single most significant episode in such conflicts was
the revolt led by Trunajaya in 1676 in Madura. A relative of the ruler
of Madura, Trunajaya had seized power in the island in 1671, and
rejected the overriding authority of Amangkurat I of Mataram. The
Sultan could hardly allow this act of defiance to go unheeded. He sent
his son to Surabaya, the port city across the narrow straits from
Madura, to try to bring an end to the revolt, but he failed. In Septem-
ber 1676, Trunajaya and his army crossed the straits to Java and started
a campaign along the north coast. Within about two months, Truna-
jaya’s authority was acknowledged by most bupatis along the coast as
far west as Cirebon. The fact that Trunajaya was able to gather to his
army many Javanese, to supplement the Madurese he had brought with
him, testifies to the extent of discontent with the rule of Amangkurat
in Java itself. Further, Trunajaya played very effectively on Islamic
sentiment, exploiting what many Javanese saw as the anti-Islamic
attitudes of Amangkurat, and on messianic beliefs among the Javanese,
portraying himself as the Just Prince, the Ratu Adil, come to free the
Javanese from the chaotic rule of Amangkurat and return Mataram to
the lost glories of an earlier golden age. The myth of the Just Prince
was deep-seated in Javanese society and was typically invoked by rebels
against contemporary authority to justify their rebellion.
This challenge clearly placed Amangkurat in a very difficult
position: the continued existence of Mataram hung in the balance.
Trunajaya was in control of much of the pasisir and of east Java,
and indeed in 1677 captured the Mataram capital, Plered. Unaided,
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Amangkurat seemed to have no chance of bringing the pasisir regions
back under control. The Company was the only force capable of
helping him regain the kingdom—but the Company was controlled by
the infidel Christians, a fact which would only weaken his Islamic cre-
dentials further and give strength to his opponents.
The Company did not really wish to become embroiled in a war
from which the commercial returns were doubtful. The situation was
made even more difficult for Batavia by the presence among Trunajaya’s
supporters of soldiers from Makasar. Having fled their home on its capture
by the Dutch in 1674, these Makasarese had originally gone to Banten,
but after some conflict with the Sultan of Banten had moved to east Java,
where they were warmly welcomed into the armies of Trunajaya. Batavia
feared that not only would they strengthen the fighting capacity of
Trunajaya on land, but also that their well-known seafaring skills would
enable Trunajaya to control the sea lanes along the north coast.
The Governor-General in Batavia, Johan Maetsuyker, tried to
use diplomacy rather than force to resolve the problem, but ultimately
this proved impossible. The Company finally decided to send a mili-
tary force to assist the ruler of Mataram—now Amangkurat II, who
had succeeded his late father—to defeat the rebellion, and at the same
time to expel the Makasarese. The Dutch succeeded in both these
endeavours.
Amangkurat established his new court of Kartasura, close to the
present-day city of Solo. The cost of Dutch support for his rule,
though, was high. Directly or indirectly, Mataram granted the
Company all the revenues derived from the pasisir ports; a monopoly
over the trade in textiles, opium and sugar; and the right to build ship-
yards and fortresses wherever it wished in Java.
Over the following eight decades, the VOC helped succeeding
rulers of Mataram to secure their authority by intervening in the three
Javanese Wars of Succession (1704–1708, 1719–1723 and 1746–1757).
In so doing, the VOC went some distance to helping to create the kind
of Javanese state that it imagined had always been present. By assisting
59
A Short History of Indonesia
Mataram in its disputes with local rulers of the pasisir, the Company
was intervening in a centuries-old state of conflict—or at least
tension—between the conservative courts of the inland and the more
outward-looking, and certainly more Islamic, coastal states. The rulers
of Mataram were grateful for this military assistance—but every time
the Company intervened on the side of the Sultan, there was a price to
pay. And that price was usually the surrender of more rice or more
timber or more gold to the Company, and sometimes the surrender of
more territory to the Company’s control.To balance these losses in
revenue, the Sultans had to impose more and more taxes on their
peoples, an imposition which ultimately proved counterproductive.
But there was also a sense in which the Company’s very success
in strengthening the position of the Sultans weakened its own posi-
tion. The dominant political issues in the court of Mataram in the first
part of the eighteenth century were not to do with the VOC, but
rather with the relations between the court in Kartasura and the lords
of the pasisir regions to which it laid claim. The VOC came into these
considerations to the extent that it could help or hinder the process of
exerting control over those states. The Sultan was willing to accede to
the Company’s wishes—with or without good grace—so long as he was
in need of the Company’s support in conflicts with recalcitrant vassal
states. But once most of those vassal states had been subdued, then
Kartasura started to question why Mataram still needed the support of
the Company. This situation—and indeed the sheer complexity of the
political situation in Java in the eighteenth century—is well illustrated
by the so-called Chinese War of 1740–1741 and the subsequent Third
Javanese War of Succession, 1746–1757.
The Chinese War, 1740–1741
During the reign of Pakubuwana II, who came to the throne as a teen-
ager in 1726, Mataram had felt sufficiently confident of its strength to
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pressure the pasisir rulers to stop sending tribute to the Company;
by 1732, only Cakraningrat IV, the ruler of West Madura, was still
sending tribute, primarily, it would seem, because he saw the VOC as
a useful ally in his own conflicts with the Mataram court. Within
Mataram itself, re-negotiation of the 1705 treaty with the VOC in
1733, which resulted in increased payments being made to the Com-
pany, fanned growing resentment of the state’s relations with the
Dutch. It has been argued by some that the increased payments did not
add to the burden of Java’s rural economy, and might well have pro-
vided additional economic opportunities for some entrepreneurial
Javanese. But for those of Pakubuwana’s opponents who were critical
of his relationship with the VOC, the revised treaty provided further
ammunition. There was an ethnic element here too, in that the agents
charged with collecting much of the rice which was the Company’s
due were ethnic Chinese, which caused resentment in some quarters.
In fact, both Mataram and the VOC made extensive use of ethnic
Chinese as tax collectors in the territories they controlled.
In late September 1740, VOC officials in Batavia believed they
had uncovered evidence of a planned Chinese rebellion. The basis of
the plot was that Chinese residents in Batavia believed that the
Company was planning to expel, and possibly kill, those of them who
were surplus to Company requirements, and therefore were planning a
pre-emptive strike. Open hostilities between the two sides erupted in
early October. The Company’s forces were dominant, and a search of
the Chinese quarter of the city turned into arson and mass murder. The
slaughter lasted three days and it left approximately 10 000 Chinese
dead. These killings sparked the so-called Chinese War, which quickly
spread right along the north coast as far as Surabaya.
Initially, the fighting seemed to be going strongly against
the Company. Semarang was surrounded in June. By July 1741, the
Company’s positions at Juwana and Rembang had been overrun and
the garrison in Demak, including Buginese and Balinese soldiers as
well as Dutch, forced to withdraw.
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A Short History of Indonesia
In Mataram, Pakubuwana II was indecisive in confronting what
was clearly one of the most politically complex crises he had ever
encountered. Among his advisors at court there were those who
counselled him to side with the Chinese in the hope of expelling
the Company from Java, and those who were all for supporting the
Company—ideally, holding back until the Company was on the ropes,
and then stepping in to rescue it, at the price of rescinding the oppres-
sive Java–VOC treaties. Eventually Pakubuwana decided to side with
the Chinese, presumably having concluded that the VOC was heading
for defeat. In late July, Mataram forces beseiged the Company position
in Kartasura. The VOC held out for three weeks but then fell, its com-
mander being among the dead.
This disaster convinced the Dutch that they had to accept the
only real offer of assistance they had received, from Cakraningrat IV,
assistance which proved decisive. The combination of the westward
sweep of Cakraningrat’s Madurese forces and the steady reinforce-
ment of the Company’s coastal fortresses from its headquarters in
Batavia meant that by about November, the military initiative had
passed to the Company. The seige of Semarang was broken in Novem-
ber 1741, and Mataram’s armies in the east were retreating before the
Madurese.
Pakubuwana was facing defeat. In a desperate bid to preserve his
position, he now tried to rebuild his bridges with the Dutch. The
Company was wary of his approaches, but nevertheless sent a nego-
tiating team to Kartasura. News of this development angered many of
Pakubuwana’s internal critics, men who had supported the war against
the VOC. They turned their armies against Pakubuwana, and at the
end of June 1742 captured and looted Kartasura. Within a year,
Pakubuwana’s position had changed from contemplating whether to
intervene militarily and rescue the VOC in its war with the Chinese,
to having to seek the VOC’s support to restore him to his throne, now
that Kartasura was occupied not by the Dutch but by a combined
Chinese–Javanese force.
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The VOC provided this support—but, adding to Pakubuwana’s
humiliation, it was not VOC troops which ousted the Chinese and
their allies from the court, but the largely Madurese armies of Cakran-
ingrat. Pakubuwana was eventually escorted back into Kartasura by
VOC forces in December 1742, but the court was a shambles, most of
its buildings destroyed and its treasures—sacred swords, jewellery,
gamelan sets, manuscripts and so forth—looted.
VOC support had come at enormous cost. The whole of the
north coast was ceded to the Company, along with the income from
toll-gates, markets and various duties and taxes levied by Mataram.
Partly because of the level of destruction of Kartasura, in 1746 the
capital was moved to the village of Solo (also called Surakarta).
Not all of Mataram’s princes accepted the compromise that
Pakubuwana had negotiated: in 1746, the Third (and final) Javanese War
of Succession broke out. This time, in order to get Company support,
Pakubuwana II—already a dying man—made the ultimate sacrifice: on
11 December 1749 he formally ceded sovereignty over Mataram to the
VOC. The Company now decided that the old principle of seeking to
maintain the unity of Mataram was neither feasible nor necessary, and
sought the division of the state between the rival claimants.
On 13 February 1755, the Treaty of Giyanti was signed, dividing
what was left of the kingdom of Mataram into two parts. One part,
with its capital in the city of Solo, was headed by Pakubuwana II’s son,
Pakubuwana III. The other part, with its capital 60 kilometres to
the west in Yogyakarta, was ruled by Pakubuwana II’s half-brother
Mangkubumi, who took the title Sultan Hamengkubuwono I. The
treaty was not immediately accepted by all parties to the dispute: fight-
ing went on for another two years. In 1757, though, an uneasy peace
settled on Java when Pakubuwana III’s territory was divided, with a
portion going to his cousin Mas Said, who took the title Mangkune-
gara I. The final act in the saga of the destruction and division of
Mataram took place in 1813, when Hamengkubuwono’s territory was
also split, part being hived off under the rulership of Pakualam I. In
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this way the four royal houses of contemporary Java were established,
all with at least some claim to be the inheritor of Mataram tradition.
Dutch and Javanese reactions to the Treaty of Giyanti varied
somewhat. On the one hand, for the Javanese states the end of the wars
of succession brought a period of peace and material prosperity unpre-
cedented for at least 150 years, a period which was to last until the
outbreak of the Java War in 1825. In the absence of constant struggles
for power within the state, and rebellions against it from the provinces,
the states’ resources could be devoted to more productive uses. There
was never any real chance that there would be reunification of the
states, but neither was there any real likelihood of hostilities breaking
out between them.
Nevertheless, rivalry between the royal houses became the central
feature of Javanese politics for the remainder of the eighteenth century
and well into the nineteenth; in some respects it remains to the present
day. Certainly, during this period royal rivalry was a much more impor-
tant fact of political life in the respective courts than was the presence
of the Dutch. The Dutch remained, in an important sense, peripheral
to the ‘real politics’ of Java, the struggle between the royal houses for
supremacy. The Dutch had a role to play only in the sense that they
could be called upon to support one house against another.
For the Dutch also the treaty had both positive and negative
aspects. It was bad, in the sense that they now had to deal with two
(and then four) Javanese rulers instead of just one. This certainly
added to the political costs of the Company’s Java policy, and probably
its financial costs as well. And there were problems inherent in trying
to exercise the sovereignty in Java that the treaty had promised them.
Having formal sovereignty was no guarantee of the capacity to exercise
it. The Dutch had won the war by political as much as by military
means, and even in victory their military strength was debatable.
In some respects, the Javanese states came out of the conflict more
powerful than the Dutch.
On the other hand, peace was inherently more profitable than
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war. The Company had previously strengthened the garrison it main-
tained in Mataram in case it had to fight to impose a solution to the
conflict on the rivals. Now that a peaceful resolution of the dispute
had been achieved, these forces could be withdrawn and many units
demobilised, resulting in a considerable saving of money. And the half
century or so of peace which followed the signing of the Treaty brought
considerable prosperity to Java.
The Company outside Java
I want to turn now to other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, to see
how the Company was faring outside Java.
The Dutch started to push seriously into the Minahasa region of
north Sulawesi towards the end of the seventeenth century, particu-
larly after the defeat of Makasar in 1669. A contract of agreement with
leaders of nineteen walak, or local communities, in Minahasa was con-
cluded in 1679 by the Governor of Ternate on behalf of the Company.
The aim of this agreement, revised in 1699, was to secure for the VOC
the northern approaches to the spice islands, especially from the
Spanish who had been active here and further north in the Philip-
pines. In addition, the people of Minahasa were to supply the
Company with rice and timber, though here the returns were rather
less than the Company had expected. Despite being nicknamed ‘the
bread basket of the Moluccas’ by early Company visitors, the region’s
deliveries of rice were generally lower than expected, and unreliable.
Apart from any agricultural reasons for this, it seems that the Dutch
often lost out in the rice market to Buginese traders who bought rice
here for sale further north and west, in Sulu. The Buginese were also
more attuned to the demands of the Minahasa market, supplying it
with goods, such as their own distinctive cloth, which were in much
greater demand than anything the Dutch had to sell. By the end of the
eighteenth century, rice supplies to the Company had virtually ceased.
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The Dutch had even less success in their attempts to order the
political and social lives of the Minahasans. The Company was con-
cerned, as in Java, with the maintenance or creation of a stable society
that would facilitate achievement of its economic goals. Thus at the end
of the sixteenth century the VOC recognised three walak leaders as the
leaders of the whole Minahasa region, authorised to arbitrate and deter-
mine matters of law, subject only to the requirement that they inform
the Company’s representatives in advance of issuing judgements. These
leaders were expected to create conditions of stability and order across
the region. However, they enjoyed their new privileges to the full, to the
point where their actions were seen by many Minahasans as simply
unacceptable. In places, people moved away to lands beyond their
control and that of the Company, disrupting agriculture and trade and
thus further endangering the already fragile rice deliveries to the
Company. In other regions open warfare broke out. The Company let
the system die out in the early eighteenth century, although there was a
temporary revival in the 1730s. The attempted imposition of this new
form of local leadership had brought more unrest than stability.
Much the same could be said of the Company’s attempts to elim-
inate local warfare, in the expectation that this, too, would stabilise
society. Indeed, it may well be argued that the introduction of new
commodities into Minahasa—agricultural crops such as maize, as well
as firearms—might actually have made conflict between the walak
more likely rather than less, as neighbours sought dominance over
each other. Right through to the end of Company administration at
the end of the eighteenth century, relations between walak were char-
acterised by hostility rather than by unity.
At the northern end of Sumatera, by the end of the eighteenth
century the territory owing allegiance to the Sultan of Aceh had con-
tracted substantially from its heyday two centuries earlier. Aceh now
effectively controlled only the northern tip of the island. It was, though,
still an important trading state, selling pepper, camphor, tin, gold
and silk, among other items. Despite the Painan Contract, supposedly
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limiting trading relations to the Dutch, other traders—both local and
foreign—continued to visit Aceh. The Americans, for instance, were
trading regularly with Aceh by the end of the eighteenth century.
Indeed, there was a strong American presence in Sumatera, both trading
and consular, long before there was any such presence in other parts of
the archipelago. In 1802, for instance, 21 American ships visited the
so-called ‘pepper ports’ of Aceh, Americans going on to effectively
dominate the trade in pepper here until the middle of the nineteenth
century. Acehnese traders also continued their commerce with the east
coast of the Indian subcontinent. One of the more interesting items
exported to India from Aceh was war-elephants, though this trade
declined as the Indian rulers adopted more European styles of warfare.
Further south, there was a VOC garrison in Palembang, but it
was limited to fewer than one hundred men under the terms of the
treaty with the Sultan of Palembang; the treaty noted that greater
numbers would draw into question the continued sovereignty of the
Sultan over the region.
To the west, the Dutch retained their foothold at Padang, and
with it their access to the Minangkabau highlands. In the south,
though, the British were still present in Bengkulu, enabling them to
retain a strong position in the south Sumateran pepper trade.
Overall, neither the Dutch nor the British had much of a physi-
cal presence on the ground in Sumatera in the eighteenth century.
Both were concerned primarily with trade, and saw formal treaties
with local rulers as being the best way to go about ensuring the success
of their trading ventures. In many respects, the Dutch saw their major
rival on Sumatera as the British rather than any local Sumateran ruler;
and the British returned the compliment.
The VOC moved into Kalimantan rather later than into the other
major islands. It established its first post at Pontianak on the west coast,
for instance, only in 1778, in response to a request from the Sultan of
Pontianak, whose own state only just predated the Dutch arrival. In
seeking Dutch support and protection in his competition with local
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rivals, the Sultan was doing something that other small regional states
had been doing for centuries.
By the last decade of the eighteenth century, on paper at least, the
VOC seemed to be at the peak of its power. It controlled, either directly
or via political alliances, many of the important ports in the archipel-
ago, and about two-thirds of the island of Java. It was militarily the
single most powerful state in the region. It looked prosperous, paying
dividends during the eighteenth century of between 20 and 40 per cent.
And yet in 1799 the Company was bankrupt; its charter was
allowed to lapse and it collapsed, its overseas activities—including
those in Indonesia –taken over by the Dutch Crown. How could this
have happened?
The collapse of the VOC
The first point to make here is to recognise, once again, that answers
to historical questions in Indonesia can rarely be sought in Indonesia
alone. The region’s openness to the rest of the world, through trade,
religion and politics, was such that it was routinely vulnerable to
changes in the international environment. Thus it was for the VOC.
Although the Asian headquarters of the Company were in Batavia,
the VOC’s Asian operations actually extended over a very wide area,
ranging from Japan and China across to India. Any search for an
explanation for the collapse of the Company cannot look simply at
Indonesia; conditions prevailing in other parts of the east and south
Asian worlds also need to be taken into account.
One important consideration was that the Dutch were losing
control of the lucrative trade with China, particularly to the British.
The latter had realised, much more quickly than the Dutch, that
private traders were the way of the future, just as state-chartered com-
panies had been two centuries earlier. Although the English East India
Company was to survive until the middle of the nineteenth century, as
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early as the late seventeenth century private traders from Britain were
playing increasingly important roles in intra-Asian trade.
The impact of events in Europe cannot be disregarded either.
The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784) was a disaster for the
VOC. The Company lost 70 per cent of its total assets, including
extensive shipping and facilities, to the British, on top of the costs
incurred as a result of the War.
In terms of Indonesia-based reasons for the Company’s collapse,
the one usually given is that as an institution the Company faced what
turned out to be an impossible conflict between its activities as busi-
ness venturer and as territorial administrator—that is, a conflict
between trade and politics. When it was established two centuries
earlier, the VOC represented an imaginative and innovative response
to the commercial challenges the Dutch faced in the archipelago, and
its efforts to monopolise trade in and with the archipelago brought it
substantial profits. Initially the Company had focused its activities
on trade, avoiding as far as was possible acquiring direct control over
territory or peoples.
However—so this line of argument goes—by the later years of
the eighteenth century the VOC had outlived its role as innovative
trading company and was failing to adapt to the new role it faced; in
particular it had acquired an extensive territorial empire but failed to
evolve an efficient means of administering that empire.
Under an external appearance of prosperity, the Company was
now in deep financial difficulty. One sign of the difficulties it faced
was that its debts rose during much of the eighteenth century while its
profits fell; much of the ‘profits’ it used to support the dividends it paid
to its shareholders actually came from short-term borrowings. A great
deal of potential profit was being siphoned off by its representatives in
the archipelago: despite quite horrific punishments meted out to those
of its employees who were discovered violating the Company’s ban on
private participation in trade, many did engage in such trade. Corrup-
tion in business is no new phenomenon in Indonesia.
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This argument has come under some criticism in recent times,
some authors arguing that the roles of merchant and quasi-state were
actually complementary rather than competitive: that had it not been
for the Company’s latter role, it could not have played the former one.
Yet it is clear that the way the Company combined these activities did
not always work.
The legacy of the VOC
How might we assess the impact of the VOC and its employees on
Indonesian states and societies? From the preceding it can be seen that
in the political, military and economic arenas VOC influence was sub-
stantial, but not overwhelming. The strength of the Company was
primarily a reflection of the weaknesses of its opponents, and especially
of the fact that there was no unity of action among the Indonesian
states that were its competitors. The Company’s military successes—in
Makasar, for instance, and on the north coast of Java—were made pos-
sible by the participation of Indonesian forces on the Company side. It
was only at sea that the Company’s technology and organisational
skills gave it a clear edge over its Indonesian competitors.
Within the Indonesian states, even those in Java which had
come under greatest Company pressure, the focus of attention of court
elites was still on local rivals, the Company being seen as a force which
was either a useful ally or a dangerous enemy in conflicts with those
rivals. The Company, while clearly recognised as foreign, was nonethe-
less also seen in some sense as a state operating within the established
norms of inter-state relations.
For the merchants and traders, the impact of the Dutch presence
was more substantial, in that it had pushed them out of profitable
markets and the carrying trade. However, the Company was by no
means the only force responsible for the gradual squeezing out of
Indonesians from regional and international trade, and in any event
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suffered a similar fate itself. To the extent that Indonesians were
participating in international trade during the age of commerce they
were subject to the vagaries of the international market: to the whims
of consumers half a globe away, and to the changing political and
strategic conditions in north Asia and in Europe. With or without the
presence of the Company, it is likely that Indonesian merchants and
traders in the eighteenth century would have seen their share of inter-
national trade much decreased from that in the sixteenth century.
For the bulk of the population, the peasants, the Company’s
presence for the most part had remained invisible. Even at the end of
the eighteenth century, most Indonesian territory and peoples were
not under Dutch control. Some Indonesians, it is true, by 1800 had
adopted the religion of the Dutch—and that of earlier European
powers, the Portuguese and the Spanish. But over most of the archi-
pelago, Christianity had made little impact. The only places where
there was any possibility of the Dutch exerting a degree of social and
cultural influence had been the urban areas, for the Dutch in the
Indies were overwhelmingly urban dwellers. Yet even if we look at the
culture of the urban areas at the end of the eighteenth century, what is
striking is the paucity of Dutch influence.
Indeed, it could well be argued that in terms of urban culture, the
Dutch had come under the influence of the Indonesians rather than
the other way around. This can be seen, for instance, in the develop-
ment of Batavia, the only place in the archipelago where the Company
established a civil settlement of any size. Early efforts to establish a
Dutch city, complete with canals and Dutch-style cool-temperate
climate housing, were soon abandoned as being quite unsuited to the
region. What emerged was a new type of city, drawing on Europe for
some of its features, but increasingly reliant on local borrowings, the
germination of a unique culture combining Dutch and Indonesian
elements, commonly referred to as Indische (or ‘Indian’) culture.
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5
ESTABLISHMENT OF
EMPIRE: 1800–1900
The preceding centuries saw the arrival in Indonesia of a variety of
European powers, competing with Indonesian states and with each
other for control of the trade flowing through the region, but by the late
eighteenth century, despite the collapse of the VOC, the Dutch were
the strongest of these foreign powers. Indeed, the Dutch were prob-
ably as strong a force as any individual Indonesian state, especially
since the division of Mataram in the middle of the century. Despite this,
the Dutch did not enjoy a predominant position in the archipelago; for
they still faced considerable local and European competition.
By the end of the nineteenth century the situation had changed
dramatically. No other foreign power now had a presence in the
region, with the minor exception of the Portuguese in East Timor, and
no Indonesian state of any substance stood out. The Dutch colonial
state dominated all but a few peripheral parts of the archipelago—
colonialism seemed triumphant, and was certainly triumphal.
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The triumph of colonialism was fragile. We have already seen that the
Dutch capacity to enforce a monopoly on trade in the major exports of
the archipelago had been severely damaged by the activities of the
English East India Company and private British traders in the first half
of the eighteenth century, and by the Dutch defeat in Europe in the
fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–1784. It would hardly be an exag-
geration to say that the Dutch came to control the Indonesian
archipelago in the nineteenth century in part because it suited their
main international trading rival, the British, to allow them to do so,
and in part because—as in previous centuries—their Indonesian
opponents were never willing to forgo traditional rivalries to form a
united front against them. The Dutch empire in the Indies came about
largely by default.
The initial consolidation of empire came in Java, where the
Dutch presence was historically the strongest, at the turn of the nine-
teenth century. At this point both the remaining Javanese states and
the Dutch administration were in transition.
One of the arenas of greatest turmoil was the Yogyakarta-based
state ruled by Hamengkubuwono II, successor to his father Hameng-
kubuwono I, who had died in 1792. Hamengkubuwono II was a much
less astute ruler than his father, and the state quickly became divided on
numerous issues, ranging from nominations to the bureaucracy to the
Sultan’s personal behaviour (especially with respect to religious matters)
to the level of taxation imposed on both peasants and aristocrats.
The Dutch administration was facing even greater challenges.
Following the collapse of the VOC in 1799, administration of the
Indies had fallen to the Dutch government. But the Netherlands fell
to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806, and Napoleon’s brother Louis was
placed on the Dutch throne. Committed to the liberal ideals of the
French Revolution, Louis appointed Herman Daendels as Governor-
General of the Indies to put these ideals into practice.
Daendels was a radical thinker who wanted to modernise the
colonial administration on Java and eliminate elements of feudalism
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such as forced labour and delivery of crops. He also wanted to extend
the territory under direct Dutch rule, and the courts in Solo and
Yogyakarta to treat the representatives of Batavia not as ambassadors
of a foreign state, but as representatives of the sovereign power.
Overshadowing Daendels’ efforts were the effects of the Napo-
leonic Wars. The British had established a naval blockade of the
Indies, and were threatening an invasion, thus administrative reform
had to take second place to fortifying Java against the threat of British
attack. Under Daendels’ direction, a highway was constructed along
the north coast of the island to facilitate the movement of troops and
materiel, major armaments factories were established and the locally
recruited army expanded from 4000 men to 18 000 men.
These developments all had to be paid for—and the only way
Daendels could do this was by going against some of the very prin-
ciples he had previously championed. In order to raise money he
permitted the renting and selling of land to European and Chinese
entrepreneurs. In order to raise a workforce to undertake war-related
construction work, forced labour was expanded. These and other
measures increased substantially the burden placed on the Javanese,
and the peasantry in particular.
The royal courts, however, did little to resist these further
encroachments on Javanese hegemony. In 1810 one of Yogyakarta’s
regional officials launched a rebellion against the Dutch, but it was
easily put down. Daendels then demanded that Hamengkubuwono II
take personal responsibility for the rebellion, and pay Batavia com-
pensation. When he refused, Daendels marched on Yogyakarta in late
1810, captured the city and forced the Sultan to abdicate in favour of
his son, Hamengkubuwono III.
All this effort, however, was finally in vain. Daendels completed
his term of office in May 1811, but in September the same year, after
a short military campaign, the colony of Batavia was captured by the
British. Hamengkubuwono II took advantage of the confusion this
inevitably aroused, and proceeded to depose his son.
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The British appointed Thomas Stamford Raffles, later to become
famous as the founder of modern Singapore, as Lieutenant Governor-
General of the Indies. Raffles quickly came to the view that
Hamengkubuwono II was unacceptable as a ruler. Uncovering an ex-
change of letters between him and the ruler of Solo, which implied a
plot to attack the British, in 1812 Raffles sent a military expedition
against Yogyakarta to depose Hamengkubuwono. The city was bom-
barded and then stormed. The Sultan was captured and his son
reinstalled as ruler.
Raffles proposed following the same general principles Daendels
had espoused in administering the lands now under his control: the
abolition of forced labour and forced deliveries. But to compensate for
the loss of government revenue from these changes, he proposed the
imposition on Javanese farmers of a land rent tax. This would be col-
lected by the bupati, acting now as agents of the British government:
as British tax collectors, in other words.
Like Daendels, though, circumstances prevented Raffles achiev-
ing all that he wanted. In 1816, as a result of the ending of the
Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the re-assertion of Dutch independ-
ence, the British handed back to the Netherlands the territory they
controlled in the Indies.
By this time, Hamengkubuwono IV had ascended the Yogyakarta
throne, but the state was moving rapidly towards economic and
political collapse. A major problem was that the annexation of
Yogyakarta lands by Daendels and then Raffles had deprived many
officials of their living, since they no longer had people or land under
their financial control. But the Dutch themselves were not in a much
better state, for the cost of their involvement in the Napoleonic Wars
had been extremely high; economic recovery seemed a long way off.
Thus both the rulers of Yogyakarta and the Dutch were concerned to
find alternative ways of making a living out of the island.
For their part the Dutch raised tolls and customs duties
substantially; Raffles had taken over these forms of taxation from the
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Sultan in 1812, in a move ostensibly aimed at curbing corruption
and lessening their burden on the peasants. The Dutch Resident in
Yogyakarta also encouraged court officials to rent out the land still
under their control to European and Chinese plantation entrepre-
neurs. It became standard practice for the officials to receive advance
payment of rentals from those entrepreneurs.
These actions bore heavily on the peasants. They had to supply
labour to work the land rented to foreigners, and the fact that an
increasingly large amount of land was being put under plantation crops
meant that they had less and less land on which to plant food crops for
themselves, rice in particular. The population of Java had increased
rapidly in the half-century or so of peace which had followed the
Treaty of Giyanti; it was now facing an increasingly critical problem of
food supply, and in 1821 there was a particularly poor rice harvest.
While it was certainly not due entirely to the appropriation of rice
fields for the cultivation of plantation crops, this was one of the factors
involved, and overall the peasants felt they had good cause to be
aggrieved at the practice of renting land.
The system was abolished in 1823, not because of its impact on
the peasants but because of a change in colonial policy. The new
Dutch Governor-General, van der Capellen, believed that the state,
not private entrepreneurs, should play the leading role in the
exploitation of Java’s abundant land and labour. Land rented by
private entrepreneurs therefore had to be returned to its owners, any
pre-paid rentals refunded and compensation made for any improve-
ments the renters had made to the land, such as irrigation systems
supporting sugar cultivation. The problem with this was that in many
cases the bupati had already spent the money they had received
for rentals, and were thus placed in severe financial difficulties. For
this they blamed both the Dutch, for obvious reasons, and also
the rulers of Yogyakarta, arguing that the latter had aided and abetted
the Dutch.
We thus have a situation in the early 1820s where a solid wedge
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had been driven between the bulk of the Javanese peasantry and many
of the regional and religious officials on the one hand, and the court
rulers and the Dutch on the other. This divide was to result in the so-
called Java War of 1825–1830, the last significant war to be fought in
Java between local forces and the Dutch until the late 1940s. It cost
over 200 000 lives, the overwhelming majority of them Javanese,
although 8000 Dutch soldiers were killed as well. While the monetary
cost of fighting the war almost bankrupted the victorious Dutch, it was
a war that they, and their local allies, clearly won.
The central figure in the forces opposing the Dutch was Prince
Diponegoro, a son of Hamengkubuwono III and thus a direct descen-
dent of Sultan Agung. He had been brought up away from the court,
in the care of his great-grandmother, and his education had followed
both Javanese aristocratic and Islamic traditions, a combination
unusual in court nobility at this time.
Being of royal blood, Diponegoro wielded considerable influence
among peasants and aristocrats alike, an influence consolidated by the
fact that he was clearly not a participant in the government of
Yogyakarta, despite being from the royal family. Diponegoro was also
seen as a focus for Islamic dissatisfaction with the conduct of the court
and the extent to which it was coming increasingly under the influ-
ence of the Christian Dutch.
But there was one other element in this equation, a factor that
substantially strengthened Diponegoro’s position as the focus of oppo-
sition to the court elite, particularly in the eyes of the peasants:
Yogyakarta in the early 1820s was experiencing a string of natural dis-
asters. The rice harvests had been poor. In 1821 a cholera epidemic
had struck; in 1822 the volcano Mt Merapi, situated immediately
to the north of Yogyakarta, had erupted. These disasters combined to
convince many that the Sultan was losing his right to rule, and that
there would soon emerge a new sultan. Just as Trunajaya had done
nearly two centuries earlier, Diponegoro encouraged the view that he
was the Just Prince, come to take over the throne and thus free his
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A Short History of Indonesia
people from oppression and return the kingdom to a state of harmony
and tranquillity.
If Diponegoro was increasingly seen as an ally by those Javanese
opposed to the rulers of Yogyakarta, conversely he was increasingly
seen as an enemy by both those rulers and the Dutch. By the mid-
1820s the latter were actively seeking ways of bringing him to heel. A
decision to drive a road through his ricefields in Tegalrejo finally pro-
voked him into outright opposition to the court and its Dutch allies.
A combined Dutch–Javanese force was despatched to Tegalrejo in
1825 to capture him, sparking off the war.
Initially Diponegoro’s forces were quite successful, scoring vic-
tories against the Dutch and the Sultan’s forces as far east as Madiun,
and along the north coast. Surabaya was threatened. The city of
Yogyakarta was itself besieged and supplies of food cut off. By about
1828, though, a stalemate had been reached. The Dutch were finding
the cost of the war so high that they started seriously to consider
cutting their losses and abandoning Yogyakarta altogether. But one last
effort was to be made to capture Diponegoro—by whatever means.
Diponegoro was invited to meet with the Dutch commanders in
the town of Magelang, to the north of Yogyakarta, ostensibly to discuss
a truce. Instead, he was captured and on 28 March 1830 sent into exile
in Sulawesi.1 Such was the reliance of the anti-Dutch forces on
Diponegoro’s leadership that with his capture the resistance to the
Dutch largely dissipated. Some skirmishing continued for a few years,
but the war was effectively over.
The Diponegoro (Java) War marks a watershed in Javanese and
Indonesian history more important than the collapse of the VOC in
1799. The capture of Diponegoro marks the end not just of an era in
Javanese history, but also of an age, an age in which the Javanese states
were independent political entities, able to determine both their inter-
nal and their external political structures and relationships. It was the
last of the priyayi-led wars or rebellions; after Diponegoro’s defeat,
the priyayi were increasingly absorbed into the colonial state.
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The Java War was not the only Indonesian war in which the
Dutch were engaged in the 1820s, however—they were also fighting a
protracted war in the Minangkabau highlands of west Sumatera.
For centuries Minangkabau had been an important agricultural
and commercial centre, and a stronghold of Islam. Secular political
authority in Minangkabau lay in the hands of an aristocratic elite, com-
parable in many ways to the Javanese priyayi. Like their Javanese
counterparts, the Minangkabau elites were hereditary, and ruled their
regions largely as independent fiefdoms, acknowledging only the loose
hegemony of the ruler of the state. Late in the eighteenth century,
though, and into the nineteenth, Minangkabau society was undergoing
a major shake-up that was to upset the balance between its various
political elements.
The aristocratic rulers had traditionally based their economic
well-being on their control of the trade in gold. By the middle of the
eighteenth century the gold mines were beginning to peter out, and
thus the economic strength—and the political strength—of the rulers
began to decline.
At the same time as the gold trade was drying up a new com-
modity was beginning to impact on Minangkabau society: coffee.
High-quality coffee had for some time been a major product of the
highlands—but it was a crop grown by ordinary peasant farmers, not
controlled by the aristocratic elite. The international demand for
Minangkabau coffee rose at the end of the eighteenth century, espe-
cially following the appearance at Padang of the first American
traders. The result was to pour extra resources into the hands of the
coffee farmers, people who had not previously enjoyed much wealth,
and certainly very little political power.
This inflow of money into rural Minangkabau was one of the
major factors behind the strengthening of Islam at this time. Many
rural boarding schools or pesantren—in Minangkabau, as in many
other parts of the archipelago, a key factor in spreading the Islamic
faith—took to growing coffee to boost their incomes. The prosperity
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A Short History of Indonesia
the coffee boom brought to rural Minangkabau society also meant that
more people were able to afford to make the pilgrimage to Mecca than
ever before. This was significant in itself, but was made doubly so
because of the influence of the puritanical Wahhabi Islamic reformist
movement, at that time sweeping through Arabia.
Some of the Minangkabau scholars who were studying in Arabia
came under the influence of the Wahhabis. In 1803, according to
Minangkabau folklore, three of these scholars—known as Paderi—
returned to Minangkabau and set about organising a reformist
movement. They were opposed to gambling, cockfighting, much of the
matrilineal customary law, the consumption of alcohol, opium and
tobacco: in general, those parts of everyday Minangkabau life which
they regarded as being in conflict with the true principles of Islam.
This reformism sat rather uncomfortably with many elements of
Minangkabau society. For one thing, through their attacks on matri-
lineality, the Paderi were directly attacking the legitimacy of the
aristocratic elite—which had a vested interest in seeing the established
order of things continued. Many ordinary Minangkabau were also dis-
turbed by what they saw as the excesses of the Paderi. They found it
difficult to understand, for instance, why they had to imitate the
lifestyle and forms of clothing used by Arabs in the desert in order to
be good Muslims in Minangkabau. They could not see what the con-
nection was between purifying the faith and the way in which women
walked, the direction their eyes pointed, the wearing of a beard by the
men and so forth.
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, this tension erupted
into a civil war between forces supporting and opposing the Paderi.
Initially the fighting went the way of the Paderi. In 1815, most of the
Minangkabau royal family was murdered, giving the Paderi a major
victory. Their forces then pushed north into the Batak highlands,
trying to convert their inhabitants to Islam.
We need now to move back in time a bit, and look at how the
British and then the Dutch reacted to these developments.
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Colonial reactions
The British, who had taken Padang from the Dutch in 1795, initially
took little interest in the conflict in the Minangkabau highlands.
But when Raffles took up his appointment as Governor of the British-
controlled territories in Sumatera in 1816, he tried to extend the
region under Padang’s control, sending an expedition into the high-
lands to establish a series of British outposts. Raffles was prepared to
deal with the aristocratic elite and to give them some kind of support
in their conflict with the Paderi in return for trade concessions, but he
was defeated by the passage of time; in 1819 the British returned
Padang to the Dutch, and thus ended his Minangkabau exploits.
After the return of Padang to the Netherlands, there remained
(for the Dutch anyway) the irritant of the British presence in Beng-
kulu. For the British there were a few Dutch irritants around too: the
Dutch settlements at Melaka, and in India. In 1824 Britain and the
Netherlands negotiated the Treaty of London, in which a clear divid-
ing line was drawn between the interests of the British and the Dutch
in Southeast Asia, running through the Straits of Melaka. Thus
Bengkulu was handed over to the Dutch, and Melaka to the British.
The Dutch also undertook to recognise British sovereignty over Singa-
pore. The treaty was strongly opposed by Raffles, who saw it as ending
for all time his chances of building a British empire in the archipelago.
So it was; but he was unable to persuade London to his point of view.
The treaty as a whole was of major historical significance. For the
first time in recorded history, the great trade route of the Straits of
Melaka was clearly divided between rival powers, one on each side
of the Straits, rather than being under the hegemony of one state. This
treaty is the reason why the present-day border between Malaysia and
Indonesia runs where it does, down the middle of the Straits; and why
that boundary is thus defined geographically rather than by following
any clear ethnic or economic line of division.
81
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